WHEREAS

“WHEREAS” employs no traditional meter, but develops in lines of free verse with no formal pattern of rhyme. The speaker is first-person. Stanzas are composed of eight couplets, one tercet, eight monostiches, and three final stanzas of unmetered, unrhymed prose poetry. In the case of the couplets, the first line is fairly long, with the second slightly shorter, all of which end in a semicolon.

The experimental form borrows structure from a primary source—a 2009 U.S. Senate resolution. As such, the long lines of the stanzas give the impression of a legal document, with one “article,” or stanza, giving away to the next, and connected through the repetition of “Whereas.” The poem borrows and then deconstructs the language of the source document to investigate meaning.

Anaphora is the repetition of a word or series of words at the beginning of successive phrases. The vehicle for this prominent poetic technique in “WHEREAS” is the titular word; every stanza begins with “Whereas.” In legal documents, the word is used to introduce a new passage or article, but the meaning of the word can be ambiguous.